Author: Day｜Plain Language Blockchain
This year’s Telegram Bot track has become hot, leading to increased attention to the related concepts of the Telegram platform. TON has quickly risen to No. 9 in terms of market value (currently back to No. 11), suddenly becoming known to everyone.
In addition, at the recent TOKEN2049 summit, the Telegram team stated that through TON, Telegram will become the gateway to Web3, attracting wide attention to the related concepts of Telegram and further fueling the popularity of TON. Of course, opinions on the future development of Telegram are mixed, with some optimistic about the emergence of a wealth effect in the ecosystem, while others believe that the hype may not lead to substantial results.
Today, let’s briefly understand the development process of Telegram and TON in the blockchain industry.
- A History of DWF and Andrei Grachev
- Backed by the social media giant Telegram, will the TON ecosystem be a flash in the pan or a roaring success?
- After the JPEX case, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission can no longer sit still.
01 Telegram’s Attempt in the Blockchain Field
Telegram has a large user base worldwide, with 1.3 billion registered users, many of whom come from Russia, Iran, India, and other Asian and European countries. According to the Telegram founder’s statement on his personal channel on July 18, Telegram has more than 2.5 million new users registering every day, with a monthly active user base exceeding 800 million.
According to data compiled by Statista in January 2023, this figure is 1.4 times that of Twitter (556 million), 0.61 times that of WeChat (1.309 billion), and 0.86 times that of Facebook (931 million), surpassing TikTok (715 million). Currently, Telegram is one of the essential apps for the crypto community, with a large user base in the crypto field.
Telegram has been optimistic about the blockchain field for a long time. As early as 2017, Telegram released a whitepaper called Telegram Open Network (TON). TON is designed as a decentralized blockchain platform to provide secure and high-performance blockchain solutions to support Telegram’s communication and services.
In order to support the development and launch of TON, Telegram conducted two rounds of fundraising in 2018. They raised $1.7 billion from 175 investors, making it one of the largest financing rounds at the time. The estimated total market value of the token Gram was $29.5 billion, about twice the market value of Ethereum at the time and second only to Bitcoin, indicating the high level of hype at that time.
Telegram originally planned to issue Gram Tokens in March 2019. However, the blockchain project was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), claiming that Telegram’s token sale violated U.S. securities regulations.
In the end, the court sided with the SEC, prohibiting Telegram from issuing its cryptocurrency Gram within the United States and requiring the refund of investors’ funds. Under the court’s ruling, on May 13, 2020, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced the termination of TON’s research and development and started to refund part of the investors’ funds, which dealt a significant blow to Telegram’s blockchain ambitions.
Although TON was terminated, Telegram is still looking for opportunities in the blockchain field. They have launched Telegram Passport and Telegram Payments. Telegram Passport allows users to share identity information between different blockchain identity verification services, while Telegram Payments provides a way to make payments on the Telegram platform. This demonstrates their attention to the potential of blockchain technology in user identity verification and the financial field.
According to some reports, Telegram is considering adding a cryptocurrency adapter to its chat application. This means that users can directly conduct cryptocurrency transactions on the Telegram platform without leaving the application. There are also reports that Telegram is considering integrating a cryptocurrency wallet into its chat application. This will enable users to store and send cryptocurrencies within Telegram, further promoting the adoption and use of cryptocurrencies. This series of operations lays the groundwork for future cooperation between Telegram and The Open Network.
02 TON Relay Telegram?
In May 2020, TON Labs, the TON project’s technical development team, announced the open source of the TON project’s code and the termination of the project’s development. Subsequently, the decentralized community Free TON, composed of software developers, 13 validators, and users, released a forked version of the “Free TON Blockchain” blockchain, with the token named “Ton Crystals”.
According to TON Labs’ announcement, the community will also provide users with 85% of TON Tokens for free. The Free TON community stated that anyone can join the network. Currently, the official updates for Ton Crystals have been suspended for a long time, and the price cannot be found, basically in a dormant state.
In May 2021, the Newton developer community, spontaneously formed by the Telegram community, continued to study TON and promote the development of the TON project.
In 2021, Newton was renamed TON Foundation, and TON changed from the original Telegram Open Network to The Open Network. The on-chain encrypted token also changed to TON, with the goal of becoming the most user-friendly payment method. Starting from June 2020, a total of 98.55% of TON’s supply was open for mining, and two years later, all TONs were produced.
On April 12, 2022, the TON Foundation launched its ecosystem fund and received a $250 million investment from some institutions. This fund is mainly used to fund the development of TON’s ecosystem projects. With the promotion of the TON Foundation, TON has been launched on various platforms.
TON was originally created to serve Telegram, and although it encountered some obstacles in the process, Telegram users will sooner or later come into contact with the TON ecosystem. The main difficulties that other blockchain projects face in acquiring new users are high difficulty of use and high entry barriers. However, TON is seamlessly connected with the Telegram application, greatly reducing the difficulty. In April 2022, the TON Foundation announced the provision of a wallet bot for Telegram, which means that Telegram users can directly send and receive TON in Telegram and exchange other cryptocurrencies.
With the development of these years, the community continues to add more usage scenarios for TON, such as DeFi, periodic subsidy plans, etc., expanding the user base. TON has gradually become the underlying currency of the ecosystem, continuously expanding its application scenarios in DeFi, NFT, and other fields.
Overall, Telegram’s attempt to build TON was blocked by the SEC, but the TON technology received community support and successfully developed independently. However, when the founder of Telegram announced that he would no longer participate in the development of TON, he explicitly stated that he would not have any connection or support for the technology network built on TON. Because of the founder’s statement, the project was overlooked by everyone and lacked official support. The general consensus is that it has little chance of success without a well-known backer.
03 Current Situation
The attitude of Telegram’s founder has gradually changed over the years, from early rejection and non-recognition, with no official support, to publicly appreciating the domain name auction for TON starting in August 2022. He proposed that Telegram could also consider establishing an auction market for usernames, groups, and channels, while attempting to adopt TON as the underlying blockchain support for these future markets.
During the Token 2049 event, Telegram officially announced a partnership with the TON Foundation, integrating the self-hosted crypto wallet “TON SLianGuaice,” allowing direct access to the wallet in the Telegram menu, facilitating crypto self-circulation.
TON SLianGuaice users can seamlessly connect with TON’s ecosystem applications through their Telegram accounts, directly accessing TON SLianGuaice from TON-based decentralized applications (dApps) and enjoying its features and services. TON SLianGuaice acts as a blockchain account, supporting assets such as TON within the ecosystem. Some have compared TON SLianGuaice’s relationship with Telegram to WeChat Pay’s relationship with Tencent to illustrate the importance of this collaboration.
Although there is currently high media discussion about Telegram’s ecosystem, the partnership announcement has not brought much growth to the ecosystem’s development. According to defillima’s data, TON’s TVL is currently only 16.86 million, with no significant capital inflow.
Variation in TON’s TVL Source: hellobtc.pro
Some believe that TON’s short-term impressive performance is entirely due to the Telegram Bot, and the official partnership has not had much impact. Furthermore, the current performance of the TON ecosystem is average, with most projects being replicas of the Ethereum ecosystem and lacking any outstanding features. However, others hold the opposite view, believing that there will be explosive projects in the future. After all, the monthly active users of Telegram reach 800 million, a terrifying number, comparable to Twitter and WeChat, and it is a gathering place for crypto users. The TON ecosystem is worth paying attention to.
04 Conclusion
Above is the current development of Telegram and the TON ecosystem. Currently, TON ranks 12th in terms of market capitalization. Some believe that this is a result of strong control by the project team, with most chips concentrated in their hands. As for whether it is worth paying attention to, opinions may vary.
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